What did Mr. Lincoln enjoy doing?

[Liz Rosenthal]

I have a little time now and would like to respond to some of the statements made on this thread during the last couple of days:

1. Yes, Lincoln did play "town ball." Yes, he hit a ball with a stick and ran the bases. There is at least one eyewitness account, and probably more, appearing in Herndon's Informants and/or other personal reminiscences published in the late 19th century, of Lincoln playing ball. The particular account I can remember actually described Lincoln running the bases with coattails flying. Not that this is so important, but it's a fact, nevertheless.

2. It's true that Lincoln did not fish as an adult. However, he was often near fishing poles. One of his frequent companions during his time in New Salem was the mysterious Jack Kelso, with whom Lincoln was able to talk about Shakespeare and poetry. Kelso was a very keen fisherman, and Lincoln was often seen with Kelso as the latter fished.

3. The term "animal rights," if it existed during Lincoln's time, was not in common usage. There may have been a few vegetarians then, but it seems doubtful to me - especially when speaking of the frontier people who settled Illinois along with Lincoln. Lincoln, and probably everyone else on the prairie, wore animal skins of one kind or another. It was either that or not keep warm. That does not mean, however, that Lincoln was not humane toward animals. In fact, the opposite was true:

**Several people recalled that, as a boy, Lincoln wrote an essay advocating for the humane treatment of animals.
**Lincoln enjoined his young playmates from abusing turtles.
**He once observed that an ant's life is just as precious to it as a human's life is to the human.
**Before his days as a lawyer, he had apparently gotten dressed up to go somewhere and, while walking toward his destination in a remote area, found a 300-pound pig mired down in mud. Lincoln initially preferred to continue on and not get his clothes messed up, but he was too concerned about the pig. Thus, he soiled his clothing as he helped the animal out of the mud, because, otherwise, as he thought, the pig probably would have died.
**Some years later, as a lawyer, he was riding with some colleagues when some of them realized that he was no longer with them. When he finally caught up with them, he told them that he had stayed behind to find the nest that baby birds had fallen out of so that the "mother" would be sure to find them again. He explained that, if he hadn't done so, he wouldn't have been able to sleep that night.
**One day, Lincoln observed a man on a frothy-mouthed, exhausted-looking horse galloping by. Lincoln yelled at the man to stop and asked what the hurry was. The man said he had to take care of a land title before someone else beat him to it. Lincoln told the man to leave his horse so that the horse could be watered, wiped down, and rested; he let the man borrow his own horse, which was already watered and well-rested.

4. Lerone Bennett did not reveal anything that we all didn't already know about Lincoln. It seems that he "cherry-picked" and mischaracterized information that had been available for ages. Some months ago, I saw a documentary about Lincoln on public television, hosted by African-American historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (For trivia freaks, Gates was the Harvard academic who was arrested in 2009 by police for breaking into his own house in the Boston 'burbs and with whom President Obama arranged a "beer summit" to also include the white arresting officer and thus calm tensions.) Anyway, in this documentary, Gates examined the development of Lincoln's views on slavery and race, among other things. He gave a fairly balanced picture of our 16th president in this regard and interviewed some Lincoln authors along the way. One of them was Lerone Bennett, who explained how Lincoln had fallen from the pedestal on which Bennett's parents and other relations had placed him. Basically, Bennett suffered a serious blow once he grew up and learned that Lincoln's statements and actions regarding slavery and race were not the ideologically pure statements and actions that Bennett had been taught to believe. And here you see the seeds of Bennett's mission when writing Forced into Glory. He thought he had been betrayed. It may very well have been therapeutic, a way for Bennett to rid his mind of what he believed were the unforgivable falsehoods he had been taught.

5. Lincoln did not have to be ideologically pure to be anti-slavery and feel humane impulses toward African-Americans. The fact that Lincoln was a member of the American Colonization Society did not mean that he was not anti-slavery. It also did not mean that he harbored particularly racist views. (Note my word, "particularly.") It just meant that he could not envision an American society in which whites and blacks lived together in harmony. Frankly, given what happened after the Civil War, when southern whites refused to recognize southern blacks as co-equals, or even as co-humans in a new, multi-racial society, Lincoln's concerns had a certain legitimacy to them. (Yes, northern whites were plenty racist, too. But for some time after the Civil War, most blacks still lived in the South, and the racism was, until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, much more institutionalized - and violent - than in the North.)

6. Lincoln and one other member of the Illinois legislature, a transplant from New England, took a big risk in 1837 by not endorsing an anti-abolitionist resolution of the Illinois House and then, some weeks later, introducing a separate resolution condemning slavery as bad policy and an inhumane institution while also condemning abolitionism as creating a bigger problem. This was not a half-hearted effort. It was real.

7. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, he voted for something called the Wilmot Proviso on numerous occasions, a provision that would have excluded slavery from the territories just acquired from Mexico. He also got ready to introduce a bill to free the slaves of the nation's capital, but pulled it back when he realized he was just not going to get much support for it. He didn't have to even consider introducing such a bill; his career was going along well enough without it.